A first "Hello" from the new guy

Hi All,

as most of you might have read I am one of the new guys on board of the team and I would like to introduce myself a bit and explain what my job at NG is.
As you could see, Jordi introduced me as game designer and programmer. So what does that mean ?

Well being a programmer is quite obvious, but game designer is a bit more complicated. My role as game designer is to support Jordi in creating the ruleset of Xsyon. So basically I am the guy, who tries to listen to your suggestions, combines it with his own experience, puts it in a context with Jordis visions, evaluates the technical feasibility and finally helps to integrate it, so that we all have fun.

Now as you can guess this task can quickly consume all your working time just by listening and responding to all of the players ideas and wishes. Therefore in the near future I will introduce a system to you all, how we can improve our communication and leaving enough time to me and the team to do the main task of actually designing and implementing the game. As much as I would like to talk to all of you, it will simply not be possible to do so. All I can do right now is assure you, that we already listen to your feedback. So until I have setup the system, feel free to PM me your ideas and even more important, continue to post them here on the forums. But be not dissapointed if I do not find the time to give you a personal response.

Well to give you an example, that we will really try to improve our communication, I would like to give you an answer to an issue, which was discussed now in many threats all over again. The never ending "PvP vs. PvE" struggle.

Jordi and I have a clear design vision here. Xsyon is about surviving the apocalyse and building up a new world/society. So we do not want to create a massive multiplayer first person shooter. On the other hand are conflicts and managing them (not only by violence !) the real challenge and where the most fun will come from in the long term. So we do not want to create a crafting simulator either.
What we will do to make our vision come true is to make PvPing more expensive, but also more rewarding. The new farming feature is our first step in this direction. How is it intended to work ?

As Jordi stated within the next weeks we will turn on decay and will modify the combat system in such a way, that your personal condition will have a significant impact on your fighting capabilities. So if your are hungry, thirsty, cold, unrested etc. your overall fighting performance will suffer. So you need food, clothing, a house etc. to maintain a TOP fighting performance. A PvPer will need the crafters to maintain his fighting performance, cause farming will use a lot of your time especially with low skills/stats.
On the other hand the resources will need protection, cause only your home tribe zone will be a safe zone and will for sure not be big enough, to provide all the ressources you will need in the future, cause we will also make crafting more "expensive" by turning on decay and reactivating item stats again.

At the bottom line we will focus on making PvPer and PvEer more dependend on each other.

So find a way to get along with each other For the solo players here, you can keep your way of life, but being among the best in all areas will not be possible. You can specialize or be an average allrounder. This is up to you. But we want to encourage you to interact with other players, but not neccesarily make you join a tribe.

As a starting point for the above explained process, to produce enough food to keep your comfort at MAXIMUM (again you can survive without intensive farming, but we are talking here about being at the top) you will have to find a suitable farming spot and start farming. To protect this spot you can drop an „expansion“ totem. But this totem will be attackle and your crops can be taken away or even only destroyed by others. This should generate conflicts and hopefully give you a first reason to struggle about. How the "siege mechanics" will work in detail, I will present in a different thread, where I will ask for your feedback on it, cause this post is already getting to long for a first "Hello" ...

Coming to an end, I would like to pass some personal infos. As you might have detected, I am not a native english speaker. I am 47 years old and living in germany. So if you find any typos or bad english, be nice to me or I will start to do the future posts in german only
From my profession background I am a lot more a programmer than a game designer, but I studied economics and gaming was always a passion for me especially MMORGs. So I am a newcomer as game designer but hopefully with the right skills and experience to manage the job.

I am looking forward to work for NG and I hope this post is a first start to improve our communication. As Jordi said we had a really rough launch, but we are trying our best to improve our service and finally deliver the gaming experience to you, you all hope to find within Xsyon.

In the future "they" are dependend on better resources which "they" can not gather in the home zone. And no, there will be no magical transportation all over the world, on the contrary, we are thinking about trading routes, which MIGHT give a kind of protection, but no absolute protection.
Why protection anyway ? To make ppl use them and thereby give you another spot/opportunity where conflicts may happen. This world will become pretty large in the future and we will need such spots to bring ppl together. But that is the future and it is much to early to talk about it already.

Therefore I think we should concentrate on the STARTING point first and please understand farming as such. Balancing the interests of the players will NEVER end and we have to start somewhere.

How quickly can a person or small group of persons destroy your crops, for example, given this is a 22/7 game (-2 for maintanence and crashes) how much damage could a group of lets say 3-5 Aussies cause during offpeak play when nobody is around to protect their shit? (We already know that if we wanted to we can totally denude a zone of trees/wood and stumps in about 15~30 mins)

As announced, there will be a siege mechanic implemented, which I will introduce in detail in a different thread. So no instant destruction is possible, an attacker will have to visit you in a timframe you decide to finally steal your stuff. It will be a two stage siege mechanic.

Stay tuned for more details here ... I will hopefully get everything togehter before the weekend and gather your all input during the weekend. So please do not derail this thread too much, it was meant as a first "Hello"

herzlich wilkommen, i don't mind posts in german it is just as good as my englisch (Native is Dutch)
Glad to hear that you guys hear us, some of the greatest MMO's did that and prospered.
Cant wait for the first update to arrive :O
I wish you al the best and most of all have fun.